No One Will Be Saved
by Seta Suzume
Summary: Eighteen victories juxtaposed with eighteen defeats. Caesar Flickerman watches the Third Quarter Quell.


author's note: Something of a follow-up/counterpart to "Any Last Words"

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><p>In the end, no one will really be saved, Caesar Flickerman thinks. There is nothing good about the choice of tributes for the Third Quarter Quell. Twenty-three victors will lose what little their killing has earned them. The one who is left in the end will almost certainly be as thoroughly destroyed by what they have been forced to do. The ones who don't go in will be wounded by what has transpired between them and what has been lost, the same as the families, the same as whoever else loves and depends on them.<p>

Every time Caesar has thought that President Snow has pushed too far with the Games, with the victors, he pushes a step farther.

There are grumblings in the Capitol, faint echoes of the outrage in the districts. Does the president think this will preserve the status quo? Caesar rather expects the opposite. There will be unrest. There will be unhappiness. More people than just twenty-three victors will die soon. (the sixteen victors already dead, from Silk, the first, to Pal, the most recent, are the lucky ones now)

And there it is, more or less. What he had always wondered about. Caesar has spoken with twenty-four tributes that the Capitol loves.

…and still the Games go on.

There is a cut being edited together from the moment the Games begin. Twenty-four victories becoming twenty-three defeats.

In his private dressing room, Caesar watches with a growing sense of sorrow and dread.

The first man is down, Hamlet Seff, on the tines of one of Finnick's tridents. Less than twenty-four hours ago, Hamlet clung to Caesar, frantic in his interview, clutching at straws. Thirty-nine years ago, he was pulled away screaming and blood-soaked from his final kill, an awkward, bookish boy with a rasping laugh. His arena was whipped by dry winds. He lubricated himself well for all the time in between. How many dry days did he have in all those years? His dying gasps seem oddly familiar.

The speed of every action around the Cornucopia increases to a frenzy.

Honey Hallwell's freckled face, spattered forty-eight years ago with mud and sewage as she looked up from her final opponent from the shadows of the manmade tunnels to the light of the sun peering down, is almost clean now as she falls back into the arena's small sea and water pushes back the blood from spear in her chest.

Woof Cambray is looking at his hands, wondering what to do with them, when the projectile strikes his head. Fifty-six years ago, he looked long at those same hands, trembling at what he had used them to do. Those Games were before Caesar's time as a host. He remembered them as simply a viewer. Woof had woven and used what he made to protect himself, to strangle. This time around making sure he knew he was the tribute and not the mentor was hard enough- as if he could kill, could win- he might not even have known how to swim.

Cecelia Songket rushes in- the opposite of a girl who once held back, fifteen years ago when she still Cecelia Weaver. When she killed three fellow children rather than leaving three behind back home. She finished her Games with a knife, but her memory was sealed with poison. It's the knife she wants this time. She gets it in her chest.

Caesar watches the gaze of Simeon Katz around the Cornucopia. If he hesitates to see that Poppy, his partner, his former tribute, his friend, is managing to flee. Thirty-four years ago, he hid so beautifully. The boy from One who searched for him couldn't discover him until Simeon was ready, behind and upon him, poised, with just a few slashes of a poorly-wielded blade to back him off a cliff. Now Simeon is out in the open and the man from One slashes him down the front. "No hard feelings," he says as he gently topples Simeon backward into the water's embrace.

Seeder Greenwile skirts the Cornucopia. She ultimately survived before from how she long she could last without food. There isn't any food to be had there this year anyway. She'll go without the weapons. The only ones she used before she cobbled together herself from other, less obviously deadly items. Caesar wonders as to her direction. Is she headed after the unusual Four-Twelve alliance or trying to catch up to Chaff? In truth, she's following closest on the footsteps of Poppy. Before she left her cold arena thirty-five years ago, she looked back at the nightmare she was leaving behind her. Her look back now is much more brief, but that's all the time it takes for her to see Enobaria's arm rise in an attack just before she drops her.

The bloodbath is winding down as nearly everyone remaining at the Cornucopia is either dead or allied. Holland Taunch is lying on his stomach. Cashmere bends down and flips him over. He is unconscious, but still alive. Thirty-three years ago, he had been temporarily deafened toward the end of his Games. He didn't hear and, thus, didn't respond to the announcement of his victory. Another "boring" tribute and victor from District Nine, former shop-boy Holland is spared conscious awareness of his loss.

Cashmere shades her eyes and scans the beach. There are the scuffmarks of hasty footprints in the sand, but no other tributes remain in sight.

"All right," sighs Brutus, "Shall we talk?"

The Gamemakers deem the bloodbath over. The cannons begin to sound.

The victors from Ten stop holding hands only when they burst out of the brush, stumbling into the path of the extremely odd Three-Seven alliance. Neither group intended to find the others here, but there is little love lost between them. "Akky!" Dace screams as one of Johanna's axes finds purchase, sinking deep into her shoulder, blood spraying from a wound that strikes dangerously deep.

Wiress gasps and screams and clings to a woozy Beetee. But Blight holds back, and Johanna manages to stop herself after just about a yard, as the Tens turn almost immediately in retreat. Only seven years ago, the adorably young-looking then as now Akane Celice won with heavy assistance from Dace, her mentor. The Capitol ate her up (in more ways than one), but no one loved her as much as Dace.

And now she's bleeding out uncontrollably and it's all Dace can do to try and put pressure on her injury as he picks her up and carries her away from their foes, but no amount of pressure will stem that tide. She is bleeding all over him, herself, the ground, her face going white. "Akky! Akky!" Dace lays her down and tries to keep her with him. She doesn't look up and say "Dace," like she did the first time when she was finished. She doesn't slip and say "Daddy," like she almost did in her final interview, an endearment that often left so many of their compatriots giving Akane and Dace a cautiously skeptical eye.

"Akky!" Dace kisses the dead girl.

He doesn't leave her body as quickly as the Gamemakers like them too, but he doesn't do anything that would require much commentary either. Nothing particularly strange. Nothing at all seditious. "Akane…" he strokes her face and arranges her hair.

He touches the bolas at his waist. He may fight harder now in her name or he may turn suicidal to meet her. Either way, he becomes only a more interesting part of the show.

As much as Caesar loves the pair from Twelve, he knows he cannot have them both again. None of them can. He will sell all the remaining sixteen tributes as kindly as he can.

It turns out things are hardly winding down for the night. Caesar, napping on the couch in his dressing room, is awoken after just a short while for more.

Plutarch seems so pleased and smug as his gong rings out twelve times to signal the hour. Caesar, still off-camera getting his makeup touched up, rolls his eyes. Gamemakers. Honestly.

A big tree lights up wildly as lightning strikes it again and again, but things don't really get going again until the blood rain starts up, soaking and setting the nerves on edge of the Three-Seven alliance. Blight is angry and frustration renders his hard-bought speech all but incoherent as he rushes onward, trying to find a way to escape the thick, wet mess.

Wiress rattles out more than double the words that Blight does, but is almost equally incoherent, at least as far as Johanna's understanding of them is concerned and Beetee is in no shape to translate. At last something immediately meaningful escapes Wiress' lips: "No!" she shrieks, "Wait!"

Blight Alen hears too late to even turn, flung backward after meeting the perimeter forcefield headfirst. "Blight! Blight!" Johanna yells, dropping down beside, but almost afraid to touch him (what was it that did that? with all the blood still falling on him its not like she can clearly see). Twenty-eight years ago a blow to the head rendered him nearly speechless and he fought against that damage for all the time between. He won, anxious and jittery. Now another blow to the head has finished him. He is still, his heart stopped.

Johanna curses and fumes and shudders before taking hold again of the wobbling Beetee and even more wildly flailing Wiress. She has strong words for Wiress, for the Gamemakers, for President Snow, and for Reinhold Meyer out in Mentor Central, who mentored her once and Blight twice. Caesar wonders what old Reinhold will say when the interviewers get their microphones to him.

There is only so much time for these side matters though as the hazards of the clock-based arena continue to spin around and the Four-Twelve alliance is sent to running (Caesar is relieved that the lovers will not be swept away so fast in their sleep). The fog chases them, stretching and stinging and wounding. Tumbles are taken- will they make it? All four of them?

Finnick and Katniss try to switch burdens, but their effort just isn't enough.

Mags Gaudet kisses Finnick and turns back. The oldest one who went into the arena moves on feet weakened from before she left her similarly tropical arena sixty-three years ago, the wound from the shark bite she never quite shook only made a further disability by the compounded damage of her stroke several years ago. Caesar was just a boy when he watched her let her last remaining opponent bleed out to win. Now she turns away to let other tributes live.

The action proceeds apace and even when no battle continues to occur there is plenty for Caesar to say.

And then Peeta triggers the monkey-mutts. It is good to watch Katniss and Finnick in fine form, but it won't be enough to save Peeta- until Poppy Lowell bursts from the brush and the monkey's fangs sink into her flesh instead. It's a strange and wondrous thing- what was she thinking? Though twenty-one years ago, at the end, who knew quite what she was thinking either when she pretty little girl tanned by her time in her arena rather than a pale, sallow woman trembling possibly as much from the attack as from Morphling withdrawal?

Like so many others, those final shots of her in that first arena had showed her looking to the sky and that is where Peeta directs her attention in her final moments now. Caesar is touched by Peeta's gentleness.

Though the action reasonably slows again, the day proceeds as bloodily as it began.

Phebe Burke, perched high in a tree and as far from any of the other tributes as can nearly be managed, is doing more or less as she said she suggested to him she would by her pointedly bland interview- a version of what brought her a long ways into her Games without much notice eighteen years ago, a variation of what her tribute who came the closest any of hers ever managed did last year- going off alone and managing for herself, willing everyone to forget her.

And perhaps most of the other tributes have forgotten her at this point, but the Gamemakers forget no one. Her position is kept onscreen by her tracker no matter where she goes or what hiding place she finds. The arena goes on doing its job. On the final day in her Games, Phebe dodged a potentially deadly blow and got the last hit in there, a precision attack- all that it took to make the kill.

There is no way to dodge the full-wedge wave. The quiet woman screams so loud that half the remaining tributes hear her.

Phebe's death is more the sort that Caesar expects, but the nature of these Games continues to confound him. A new alliance forms- or reforms, perhaps, meeting up in fulfillment of earlier plans. There are two groups now and only Dace and Chaff left wandering alone.

When the two large alliances converge at the Cornucopia, there is practically a second bloodbath.

Wiress Rosen is singing to herself as she washes that strange coil of wire, like she sang to herself in the scrapheap tunnels nineteen years ago as she built the contraptions that she used to cause all of her kills. Caesar thinks it's a different song, but what difference does it make in the end? Wiress was always fond of music, almost as much as she was of inventing new devices. Her warbling voice is silenced as Gloss slits her throat.

Gloss Rausch goes down with Katniss' arrow just as quickly as Wiress and also in the presence of the person who loves and understands him most. In those Games he strangled an inept would-be archer boy with the string of his own bow. Eleven years ago he followed his sister in victory, the first, and thus far only, sibling victor and was loved all the more for it while Cashmere looked on with what might, in retrospect, have been carefully restrained horror. Now he precedes her in death.

Cashmere Rausch, who cut a gracefully blood swath through the field twelve years ago, always managing, up through the very end, to keep any unattractive facets of anger and rage off her face, may be wounded to the figurative heart by the death of her brother, but it is Johanna's axe in her chest that takes her down. She has bared her murderous feelings for all to see, but even when she allowed herself greater latitude than her first time around, she managed to be pretty.

The Gamemakers, unwilling to let this bit of alliance-clashing drama end here, take control and set things literally spinning.

On his own, Dace Liatta, who, twenty-seven years ago, turned his well-honed skills from training and handling animals on a ranch in District Ten around to calm and tame mutts in his arena enough that they wouldn't attack him (though not enough to make them do his bidding as he'd hoped), encounters a pack of a far less mammalian sort of mutt that is entirely immune to his charms.

He gets a good view of the rather immense chunks the carnivorous, wolf-sized beetles are biting from his heavy stomach before he goes down, bolas in hand, screaming out of pain, for his mother, for Akky.

Only three days and there are just eight left. Two-thirds gone. There are rather unconventional final eight interviews going on.

Caesar isn't relishing any of this, but this is the job he has. There is no getting out of it now. Until the bitter end, the show must go on.

Everything builds toward a confrontation. It may end today in a wild melee, the strangest and the saddest Games ever seen.

Brutus cuts down the attacking Chaff Evaugustine as things come to a head while Enobaria chases Finnick toward the lightning rod tree. Thirty years ago, Chaff lost one hand and now the other flies through the air, but there won't be any rescue to hold out for. Brutus is efficient and finishes him off.

The feeds are scrambling with static as Brutus Rainier appears to go down, but Caesar doesn't know what to say- what is he seeing? Is what he is seeing approved to say? What is there he can say? The arena is off-line. The arena has gone down.


End file.
